100% Growth for 8 Years: IQBAR’s Will Nitze & Jess Greenwood

**Matt Bertulli** (0:00)
Will, you've been on the show before. Welcome back. Can I call you Jess?

**Jessica Greenwood** (0:03)
You can.

**Matt Bertulli** (0:03)
Awesome, Jess, welcome.

**Mike Beckham** (0:04)
What else would you call her?

**Jessica Greenwood** (0:05)
My name.

**Sean Frank** (0:06)
Miss Lady.

**Will Nitze** (0:07)
Yeah, Miss Lady Pants.

**Matt Bertulli** (0:09)
The Lady.

**Sean Frank** (0:11)
The Lady, Iqbar.

**Matt Bertulli** (0:12)
So welcome back. And you guys have grown a ton. I mean, you got like crazy story. We're gonna get in all that today.
I would just like to start with, how many times have you guys been sued? And are you currently being sued now?

**Will Nitze** (0:26)
We're always being sued.

**Matt Bertulli** (0:27)
Let's go for it.

**Will Nitze** (0:27)
ABS, always be, oh, ABGS, always be getting sued.

**Mike Beckham** (0:32)
Getting sued, yeah. If you're a lawyer, it's ABS.

**Will Nitze** (0:34)
Yeah, because you are not trying if you're not getting sued.

**Mike Beckham** (0:37)
You have a NATO.

**Will Nitze** (0:39)
No, I mean, D2C and D2C land, and we're not predominantly retail, but still have a large e-com presence. Like, there's so many new things to get sued on with whatever. California, Optin, whatever, whatever, right? Like, it's always California or New York or what have you.

**Matt Bertulli** (0:56)
It is always California.

**Will Nitze** (0:57)
Yeah, there's always one or two.

**Mike Beckham** (0:59)
Somehow there are carcinogens somewhere in like everything apparently.

**Will Nitze** (1:03)
Prop 65 is a big one for food, which is like Starbucks fills the Prop 65 Starbucks gives you cancer.

**Matt Bertulli** (1:11)
They put Prop 65 stickers on like the windows of cars, dude. I'm pretty sure you don't eat the car window.
I don't understand why it's gotta be there.

**Will Nitze** (1:19)
Yeah, but I think the aggregate is something like six and you're always working on one or two.

**Matt Bertulli** (1:24)
I didn't realize. Did you guys start off DC and then went retail or did you start off retail, go to DC?

**Jessica Greenwood** (1:29)
A little bit of both, I would say.

**Will Nitze** (1:31)
Okay. We started with Kickstarter, which is I guess DDC, a weird form of it.
Then we rolled out a website and then very soon after we rolled out an Amazon presence, then Amazon started outpacing DDC like four or five to one.

**Jessica Greenwood** (1:49)
In the middle of all this, we had a weird blimp that puffed up where we got into 3,000 CBSs out of nowhere, out the gate. Then we really weren't ever 100 percent DDC.

**Mike Beckham** (2:03)
You guys came from Kickstarter, that's super atypical.
You might be the only founder I know that started with Kickstarter. How did you guys actually make that work?

**Will Nitze** (2:14)
Well, I don't understand how other people start because I had no money and I was like, if I'm going to manufacture 30,000 of something and I have no money, how do people do that? I was like, of course, you would need to solve that chicken or egg situation where you need to have pre-orders. I guess they'd be pre-orders is the other way to do it. But we needed to get in money and not ship stuff in return and use that money to make stuff to then six months later ship stuff and that is Kickstarter.
But the dirty secret of Kickstarter is you need 30 grand to run a good Kickstarter. You need money to even start that process. I had literally had zero money. I was living in my college buddies' parents' basement to get my burn to zero.

**Jessica Greenwood** (3:04)
You went through a few phases of some fun jobs while this was happening too. I think he nannied for a week.

**Will Nitze** (3:11)
No, terrible nanny.

**Jessica Greenwood** (3:12)
Yeah. Wait, was a life coach also for a week?
Like did a lot of random stuff.

**Will Nitze** (3:16)
One client.

**Mike Beckham** (3:17)
You're just blowing by these and each one is just opening so many questions that I could ask.

**Will Nitze** (3:24)
You can bullshit the life coach thing better, like easier than any profession on earth. Basically like give advice at a pretty generic level.

**Matt Bertulli** (3:32)
But you can't be us being a nanny, dude. There's like, there's a human.

**Will Nitze** (3:36)
I was relieved of my duties.

**Mike Beckham** (3:38)
It is a wild hybrid. I'm a life coach at night. I'm a nanny.

**Will Nitze** (3:44)
Yeah, we're mixing in some dog walking. Yeah, but...

**Jessica Greenwood** (3:47)
Those didn't work out. We just went back to working.

**Will Nitze** (3:53)
But I pretty quickly learned, okay, I'm going to do this Kickstarter. Actually, I need five grand for the video and money to try ads, which then later didn't work and blah, blah, blah. So I was like, okay, I need like 30 grand.